


The Testimony of Odin Dark

by Lunaurelle



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: 'that boy could use an epic tattoo under the mesh'?, Gen, Takes place between Awakening and Fates, Tattoos, because i have, brief appearances by severa and inigo, have you ever looked at odin dark's outfit and thought
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:40:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21948199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunaurelle/pseuds/Lunaurelle
Summary: What he saw in the mirror was sword master of Ylisse, exalted blood, son of Lissa and Lon’qu, hero, bringer of justice, aching sword hand: Owain Dark. Owain Dark was legendary, but he had penned his tale already. The sequel he’d walked into was not about him. The title of hero would belong to another, one he had not yet met.When Odin Dark becomes Odin Dark, he must decide how Owain fits into the picture.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	The Testimony of Odin Dark

He told the story like this:

Owain ran through Nohr’s streets. He narrowly clung to his balance; the spaces between the cobblestones iced into a network of tiny frozen rivers. Each breath he stole from the thin winter air burned down his throat and nose, because the climate was easily the first thing to want him dead. The men chasing behind him were the second, at the moment. He couldn't remember whether it was guards or street dwellers or, you know, maybe it had just been Severa angry. What set him into motion was never the point: where he ended up was way more interesting. After clipping one particular sharp corner, Owain spotted a basement level shop with an uneven brick staircase leading down. He dove for it, the stairs dissolving two or three at a time beneath his long strides, and the temperature dropped further when he reached the bottom. The door opened when he tried it.

The small shop was dimly lit. The light seemed to emanate from the walls—little torches, blue-green with lamplight created out of mana. Strings of feathers and scraps of cloth hung from the ceiling, the odd bead or sequin glittering as it all swayed with draft from the open door. Two bookshelves took up the left side of the room, while the rest of the shop was curtained off. Owain took his weather-battered self inside at once and pulled the door shut behind him, ducking past an uneven cut of thin red cotton. The ceiling was low enough he could become easily acquainted with it if he jumped. 

A head poked from the curtain as he entered. The woman was his age, maybe, but she was wraith pale with dusted shadows beneath her eyes. Fine wisps of dark hair drifted from pins atop her head, as if suspended in water, as she moved. She wore dark fitted clothing with a collar that crept halfway up her neck, though her sleeves were rolled and pushed nearly to her elbows. There was a small leather book tucked under her arm, pinned between elbow and ribs.

“Help you?” she said. She had a voice that was serene and even in the way the low tide was serene and even: Owain suspected if given cause, it would rise and engulf the room. 

“Yes please!” Owain belatedly wiped his feet on the mat he’d stopped on. “Can I hide behind the curtain?”

One eye narrowed. “Am I going to get arrested for harboring you?”

“No?”

She looked fantastically unconvinced. 

“I’ll be really quiet?”

Her mouth parted with disbelief. Tide, incoming. 

“I’ll be a real customer, for whatever it is you do, just please! Please, Owain Dark humbly begs of you—“

“Don’t do that.” She flung the curtain back. It hung heavy, the velvet sweeping like a cloak in the wind. It had the same suspended flutter that seemed to pull at her movements. “Get over here. If I regret it, I’ll decompose you.”

That, Owain suspected, was not an empty threat. His time spent in Nohr had given him the distinct idea that ruthlessness was ingrained into each occupant, spurred in no small part by the scowling climate and nurtured by the oppressive rule. Owain hurried back, nodding to her in thanks, noting that she barely came up to his collarbone. But when he brushed past, skimming the edge of her as he went, mana like static plucked at his skin.

So, yeah, if she decided she wanted to melt his bones out of his muscles, she could probably find a way to do so.

Owain made a mental footnote beneath her name, _dangerous,_ and set it aside for perusal when he wasn’t absorbing the hidden corner of her shop. The back wall was carefully lit with witchlight, purple and black and blue, illuminating drawings pinned collage-like from halfway up the wall to the ceiling. Some were charcoal suggestions, others inked with careful black lines. A few pieces were done in bold color the likes of which he hadn’t seen in Nohr thus far. Some were single designs, while others she’d drawn on sketches of bodies. A vine climbed an arm and stretched onto a torso here, a river flowed over rocks between shoulder blades, there. The drawings seemed to emerge slowly from the bodies they inhabited like they’d been there before the people had. The closer he looked, the more details sprang out. From the entrance, her drawings had looked like nothing more than beautiful lines. 

Below the drawings was a shelf stacked with ink and books in equal measure. Owain went nose to nose with one drawing. The lines were light curves that seemed to have been so carefully placed they would peel up and float away at any moment. The particular design in front of him was abstract, but there were concrete doodles around. Each was signed _Sabre_.

“You’re an artist!” Owain said, turning to her with fascination in his voice. 

She sat down on a narrow cot. The look she gave him now leaned closer to thoughtful. Her eyes were brown; the witchlight made them look black and a little hollow. “How many do you have already?”

“Artists…?”

“Tattoos.”

The mark of the exalt wasn’t a tattoo, but he extended his arm to her anyway. It was pale blue on his skin, edges crisp as if it had just been stamped there, taking up a third of the inside of his forearm. Her gaze curved over it, and Owain swore he could feel the path of her eyes as she absorbed its simple lines.

“That’s all?” She set aside the small leather book and traded it for a sketchpad that took up her entire lap. “You better have been serious.”

“Owain Dark is always serious.”

“You’re a bad liar.” Her eyes skated up and down his body in a way that didn’t quite make him think of healers and didn’t quite make him think of girls whose attention lingered on him. It was in some in-between space. She started sketching with her eyes still on him. Owain scratched his cheek and felt faintly red up the ears.

It was the end of spoken word for several minutes, though her attention kept him stuck where he stood as if bespelled. Maybe he had been. Ha. His study of magic was new and exciting, and so far, he was really, really bad at it. He was proud he’d been able to sense the texture of her power at all, and the longer he stood, the more he realized how her mana inhabited her space. The witchlight glowed because she willed it. The air warmed in this small back space because she deliberately toyed with it. The only place he didn’t sense a wellspring of power was at the surface of the sketchbook.

After several minutes of furious pencil scratching, she made a frustrated noise. She said, as if there’d been no break in conversation, “And complicated.”

“On the contrary, Owain Dark is very straightforward.”

“Maybe you’re not so bad at lying.” She dragged a few more sweeping lines across the page. Owain decided he was done being bewitched and stepped forward to look. 

The suggestion of something catlike bounded from one edge of the paper. Owain couldn’t name it distinctly, and the more he looked, the less certain he became it was even a cat, or an animal at all, just that the sweep of it was powerful and regal and a little unnerving. It dissolved into smoke, lines flirting with one another in abstract patterns, never meeting in sharp angles. Woven between them were constellations of fireflies. Branches grew up around all of it, holding it together. The spaces between them were dark; Owain half-expected more fireflies to blink up from the spaces there. She seemed stalled here, her pencil held off to the side.

Owain said helpfully, “Add a sword.”

* * *

She let him take the drawing home. 

It was the most awesome thing ever. The fireflies looked like they were glowing, even though they were pencil and ink. At his suggestion, she had added a sword. The guard was Missiletainn’s, no doubt gleaned because she’d had a clear view of it at his hip, but the blade was a generic thing she’d made from memory. 

He showed it to Inigo, who agreed that it was cool, and Severa, who asked if he was going to let Sabre put it on his body for real.

He hadn’t said yes. Not because it was complicated, or permanent. None of that worried him. It was very much him. But it was only him, and he spent a long time thinking about why that was bothersome. Sabre had barely asked for his input, just drawn like she’d been possessed by a seer picking apart his essence and transcribing it into a drawing. That maybe had to do with the fact she was some sort of mage. Her skin hummed and her eyes weren’t right. 

“I wouldn’t want a witch lady drawing on me shirtless, either,” Severa said, and Owain had a really hard time not taking that as a challenge.

“It’s the sword,” he said, glancing over the sketch again. “I only told her to draw A Sword. Not my sword. I bet that’s it."

He couldn’t just let Missiletainn’s distinct crossguard and pommel rest without its proper blade. It was like leaving a portrait without a face. He wanted to see the drawing reach its fullest potential. That was all. It was the coolest thing he’d gotten in Nohr; it ought to be complete. 

* * *

Three days later, he brought it back and asked if she could add to it. It took him a few tries to find the right street corner and shop, but he managed. She looked a little surprised to see him.

“First of all, the edge of the blade is like this, and there’s this etching in the center—“

“Don’t swing that around in here. Everything is _made of paper_.”

He settled Missiletainn without taking any of her sketches off the walls or spearing any of the fabric hanging from the ceiling, or piercing the curtains in her shop. She’d only given the sword a quick glance before snapping at him to sheath it, but the details sprang out of her pen as if she’d studied it for hours. The sketch was better with Missiletainn right. She’d added blood dripping around it without him even asking, which was SO COOL. 

“You still don’t like it,” Sabre said. 

“I think I actually said the opposite of that.”

Sabre tapped the page with her pencil. “Tell me more about it. Tell me what you see.”

* * *

What he saw in the mirror was sword master of Ylisse, exalted blood, son of Lissa and Lon’qu, hero, bringer of justice, aching sword hand: Owain Dark. Owain Dark was legendary, but he had penned his tale already. The sequel he’d walked into was not about him. The title of hero would belong to another, one he had not yet met. It was with these thoughts in mind he returned to Sabre again. The way was becoming clearer, but he swore even when he made the right turns, sometimes he didn’t get to the jagged stairs on the first try.

“Can you add something more…Nohr-y to it?” Owain said. He sat on the cot, which barely fit between the wall and the edges of the curtain, while Sabre balanced on a tiny stool. Beside her was an equally cramped table set with pen ink and several sticks of charcoal. Everything fit together so closely Owain had been worried about tipping one piece of furniture after the other. Sabre moved through the landscape like she were made of liquid. 

“Nohr-y.” She stretched her hand to the edge of her table, trading pen for charcoal. Her sleeve shifted back as she did, fabric rolling above her elbow. For a flicker of a moment, Owain thought there might have seen an edge of dark ink curving into the crease of her arm. He couldn’t find it after he blinked. 

“Yeah. Like real ‘Castle Krackenburg,’ with spikes or, I don’t know, gallows.” Owain gestured with both hands and nearly bruised his wrist on the low ceiling.

She softened some edges and lines until they turned smokelike, intangible. “Drawing Faceless on you is a little much,” she said, in a way that might have been joking, might have been serious.

Owain paused. “I never said it was going on me.”

* * *

The dreams got worse the further into the capital they got, which Owain took to be a sign. A sign of impending doom or heroic advent was up for debate, but you followed signs. 

“You’re still getting them?” Inigo asked one evening, after Owain said as much.

“Aren’t you?” They’d shared the first, before leaving Ylisse, and the second upon arriving here. There had been a dozen since; Owain had jotted down what he could remember between the notes of his magic text. Mostly it was _wow, big. Yikes, shadows. Kind of cool, darkness. A voice and a language I don’t know._

“The dragon ones?” Severa said. “Just the two.”

“So you didn’t...the big _whoosh_ thing with the dark and the shadowy teeth speaking, like, ancient Ylissian...no?”

“No,” Severa said. “But I did have a weird dream the other day. I think it’s this whole city. It’s creepy.” She patted him on the knee. “Don’t run away with it, okay? It’s just a dream. Not every dream is a call to arms.”

* * *

Owain sketched magic runes alongside the pattern of lace he remembered from mother’s headband. He’d started keeping a book with the intention of making sense of Nohrian magecraft, but so far, all he’d done was doodle sequences of lace overtop of sequences of spell work. Laurent always acted like magic was this immense, complicated thing, but there were so many patterns in it, Owain failed to see what the big deal was. He’d never seen mother with much more than a reference page, where Laurent and Miriel carried entire tomes. 

He asked Sabre the next time he saw her.

“I didn’t know you were a mage,” she said, as she transferred the pattern of lace he’d shown her into spaces between the tree branches on his sketch. The page was laden with ink and charcoal, and Owain was starting to worry it would rip if she set more lines into it, but it held strong. 

“Um, yeah, I dabble,” Owain said.

She nailed him with that swallowing look.

“You’re one too,” Owain said. He looked at her wall again and picked one of his favorite designs out of the bunch. It was a dragon with scales glittering blue and purple. It made him uneasy for reasons he couldn’t describe, except that it gave him the same tug behind his navel that his dreams had lately. But it was beautiful and fierce, like the lion she’d drawn him. 

She came alongside him and took his wrist, tilting his arm until he turned towards her and his mark caught the light. Her hands were cold. Her thumb smudged ink over his veins, her fingerprint a tiny whirlpool. “Who did this one? I’ve never seen a shade of blue like that.”

“It’s not really a tattoo,” Owain said. It was easy to be transparent to Sabre. Maybe it was he’d already answered so many of her questions. Maybe it was seriously a spell that hit him every time he came through the door. He’d never seen a reason to keep much from her, anyway, so he said with his best hero’s bravado, “I’m a chosen one."

Her look went flat and guarded, her grip tighter. “Royal blood?”

Owain almost said yes, because it was true. Aunt Emmeryn had been royal. Lissa was, Lon’qu wasn’t, but Owain was still tied to the Exalt. Dragon’s blood, aching power, beast within, all that. But the Exalt didn’t matter in Nohr. Owain Dark did not bring his legacy with him, here. Saying yes seemed like the wrong answer, like Sabre might close her hand around his arm until she got to the bone if he did.

“No.”

“What chose you?” _What_ like it was—

Owain remembered his dreams. “The abyss, I think?”

Sabre let him go. She pulled the drawing of the dragon down and lined it up with his biceps. 

“I still like the lion,” Owain said. 

“I know." 

* * *

Owain was too tall to lay comfortably on Sabre’s cot. She’d propped his feet on a barstool and told him not to move too much. He lay on his right side, shirtless, with his arm over his head and out of the way. Sabre focused on his skin, not his body. She balanced a book on her knee. Ink floated above it in ribbons held by her spell as she strategically pricked his skin with a needle and threaded the ink through it. There was a fine black mist that rose in the room and kept it cool. Sabre said that was just what happened when she used her spells. Owain had learned to enjoy it, even if he feared breathing it in. 

It had taken weeks to refine the design. What had started, he thought, as a really, really cool image had been brought into relief with details out of his story. Some of it he told her, and some of it she’d intuited with startling alacrity. To call it just a tattoo was a disservice. It was a story. Owain’s, specifically. While the start was with him,it hadn’t been complete without his family and friends. When Sabre had teased out the details representing them, the necessity of keeping it with him set in all at once, like a brand fresh from the flame.

She’d seemed happy. 

“Ow,” said Owain, at the end of the fourth session. It was their longest session by far. His entire left side felt like it was sunburned so badly it would blister. The sun had set several hours ago, but he was running thin on time, and he wanted the piece finished, in case he didn’t have another chance to come back. 

“Sit up,” Sabre said. 

Slowly. He’d learned that the first session, when after nearly pulling down the curtain when he’d stood the moment she’d taken her hands off. Sabre, who was at least a head and a half shorter than he, had no hope of catching him if he really dropped. He held his arm away from his body and opened the jar of salve when Sabre popped it into his hand. A tingling medicinal smell rose above the ozone from her magic.

She gave him a hand mirror. Behind him, she took down one of the curtains where she’d stowed a full length, full silver mirror. She helped him adjust the angle so he could see, tilting the hand mirror with pigment-dusted fingertips. He caught a flash of her jawline before she got the angle right. Then she stepped away, leaving his back reflecting in the polished surface, mist from her work clearing rapidly. 

The whole piece stretched from his low hip halfway up his shoulder blade, wrapping his ribcage along the way like a thoughtful caress. At first glance or a distance, it looked like a strategic tangle of lines and branches and black. But the branches were carved in places, and the lines told a story, everything penned Sabre’s deliberate strokes. She’d inlaid deep blue to shadow and reflect, and it made the whole thing look more alive than just ink on skin. Her design followed the arc of his body like a hand wrapping. 

A stylized Missiletainn with its pommel anchored at his shoulder crossed a shepherd’s staff near the hollow of his arm, held together with lace from mother’s headband and the lines and traced by the fireflies. The sheath of father’s sword was a shadow behind. A broken arrow hid in the branches with blood dripping from the fracture instead of the arrowhead. 

He’d described Lucina’s mask for Sabre, and she’d made it a true butterfly tucked into the pattern of fireflies. Smoke rose and licked at the edges of his ribs; hidden within it was the same animal, dragon or lion, depending on which details you picked out. The whole thing was grounded in a tree truck rooted low on his hip, below his waistband, with branches that grew up his ribs and faded at his pectoral and center of his shoulder.

Looking at the whole of it made him uneasy. The lines were confusing without knowing the landmarks. He’d helped come up with the landmarks, but his eyes still swam over the intertwining strokes of the design. None of the lines were thick, but there were so many, and the piece so massive, the entire left side of his back was more ink than skin. It was dizzying. Maybe that was just the lightheadedness from laying too long and too still while she’d stabbed him half a million times and sealed the tiny wounds with color and void. His skin buzzed. She’d told him it would stop after a while, and not given any indication of what _a while_ meant.

Way too much power. 

“Have someone help you with it,” she said, taking the salve onto cloth and blotting it into his skin, starting high on his shoulder. The salve soaked up some of the burn, but her hands were ice that stung, and the wash of magic dripped off her fingers only. It dissipated against his back--or maybe he absorbed it. The energy in the ink was thirsty.

“I wasn’t sure I believed you really were a mage, until I sealed it,” Sabre said. She ran her fingers from one edge of the tattoo to the other, spine to ribs, and a little ripple of power followed her fingertips. She may as well have struck a match against his skin for how it sparked. “I thought I was going to free something great and terrible every time I worked on you.”

“Oh. Um. Thank you? It’s still buzzing.”

“It’ll settle in.”

It was her mana sinking into his, or so she’d said. It held the color in and kept the lines crisp. As it healed, his own mana would learn to keep the ink in place and slowly absorb hers. For now it felt like pins and needles and the barest touch of mist. It made him shiver like he were fevered. 

“Did you come up with this yourself?” Owain said. His skin felt tight, now. She’d done something to make the pain ease. Tender skin didn’t account for the headache dug into the back of his skull. No more echoes, no more voices, but the once-whimsical dreams were turning ominous.

“Flattered. Not the inventor of magic,” she said. “I had a proper apprenticeship.” 

For someone who dyed skin for a living, he couldn’t see a mark of it on her. Once, when she leaned over him while threading the design into his skin, he thought there might have been a graceful curve of black creeping along the back of her neck, but it could have just as easily been a piece of her short dark hair. When she’d worked and rolled her sleeves to the elbows, he remembered the flicker of a shadow curving into the crease. If she held her own marks, she’d hidden them with care.

She wouldn’t name her mentor. He asked in about five different ways as she wound thin linen bandages around his torso. Her rhythm had become familiar, across the sessions. Instruct on care. Give cryptic responses to any personal questions he asked. Drift silent while they both gazed into the work she’d done. When she had him looking like a critical care infirmary patient, she painted a pattern of spell runes over the bandages.

“If anyone ever has to heal over it, tell them to be careful not to lift the ink out. Or the darkness.”

Owain laughed offhandedly, as he eased his jacket on. “That can happen?”

She shrugged and spoke with easy absolution. “Of course it can.”

* * *

It was the last he saw of her for a while.

Not by choice. Odin Dark’s dreams turned to Anankos with frequency and clarity, and before long, his path became clear. His spellwork and improvisation proved enough to impress King Garon’s retainer, and in turn, granted him favor to be named Lord Leo’s new right hand mage. Or left hand mage, maybe, because Lord Leo’s other retainer never seemed to stray from Lord Leo’s right for more than a second. It was busy: he’d made several excursions to the probably-really haunted forest on the city’s edge to fetch all manner of treasure and sacred artifact at Lord Leo’s behest. Finally, though, Lord Leo seemed exhausted of missions for him, so Odin made his own. 

Odin Dark hurried through rain a few degrees away from snow with urgency in his steps. He’d donned his swordmaster’s coat, even though his grimoire hung from the hip opposite his sword. He hadn’t tracked the time concretely, but it had been long enough that the tattoo healed smooth along his skin. It no longer jumped with power, but the thinnest layer of Sabre’s mana still lay active, closer to muscle than surface skin. It mingled well with his own, because Odin Dark was a mage. 

“Owain,” Sabre said when he entered, because he hadn’t told her about his new name or his new position. He’d considered it. He’d rehearsed a dozen lines in his head. Even in his imagination, he couldn’t come up with a way to tell her he’d tied himself to Nohrian royalty. The memory of her hand around his wrist when he’d told her the closer truth of the mark of the exalt kept his silence. Her look that day, scissors open around a thread, wasn’t one he wanted to see again. 

“Hi,” Odin said. “Sorry it took so long.”

She should have been expecting the coin he pulled from the pouch at his belt, but her eyes went wide as he plunked a heavy measure of gold onto her little table. 

“Owain,” she said, startled, “you paid me weeks ago.”

“Yeah, I know, but I needed to thank you more! Now that I have the means to. It is a truly glorious piece.”

A small, distinct smile curved her lips. He couldn’t remember seeing it before. “May I see how it’s healed?”

Odin Dark grinned a mage’s grin, unclasping his coat, then unlacing his shirt. He tossed the clothes into a pile off to the side, taking a pose with hands on hips and turning at an angle. “BEHOLD! It looks so awesome.”

Her smile stayed. She lifted her fingers, glowing grey-blue with mana at the tips, and examined the tattoo as if she were watching it rise out of the water. 

“Listen, Sabre, I cannot thank you enough. Why, soon I will tell tale of the origins of--”

“Don’t,” Sabre said, her tone the sharp snap of blades coming together he’d been wanting to avoid. Her eyes flicked quickly down, then to the side, then back to his tattoo. When she spoke, it was in the direction of the butterflies on his ribs. “Owain, your discretion is more payment than I could ask for. The rest is a kindness I appreciate. But please. Don’t draw people to me.”

That seemed, to Odin Dark, an atypical response. “Uh. But your work is amazing! You could move into bigger space, have more clients--so many people would love to have your work, of that I am certain!”

“No.” She spoke with the finality of a grave. “No, thank you. I prefer this.” As she glanced around the room, the light warmed yellow-gold and brightened for a few moments before fading back to the usual seafoam tones. 

She had the easy makings of her own legend. Everything about his experience Odin had already been winding into a tale in his head, starting with her. Odin wanted to look to the root of her, read the designs on her skin if they were there, but her closed-dark expression warned him not to. 

“Very well,” Odin said. “If that is truly your desire, you will become a secret I carry, whispered not even to the stars.”

Months later, he looked for the shop and couldn’t find it. At first it was troublesome. After a while, he told the story back to himself and marveled. It was the cornerstone of his new role. Owain lived on his skin, while Odin Dark rose to the surface. It turned Sabre into her own little legend in his mind, though he had the satisfaction of knowing she was real, even if she’d hidden herself for a time. He had the proof of her prowess on his body in the winding lines and dusting of her mana still settling into his skin. Even in his studies, he’d yet to find anything quite like she’d done. Magic like that was a true display of power. He found it inspiring.

If he could master his craft as she had, he felt certain the tale of Odin Dark would be a success when he finally told it.

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, Odin's ridiculous mage getup is clearly missing a sprawling tattoo, so I took the liberty of making one for him. Or, rather, I made up someone to make one up for him. I have a soft spot for that ridiculous goofball. Writing in his voice and point of view is just fun. Bigger the better. Make it crazy. Live your life.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading!


End file.
